from Patterson Hood (Drive By Truckers) a real Alabama boy
https://bittersoutherner.com/from-the-southern-perspective/ronnie-and-neil-and-jimmy-johnson-patterson-hood#:~:text=Young%20and%20Van%20Zant%20became,duality%20of%20The%20Southern%20Thing.
The album that Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded at my dad’s studio got pitched to all of the labels, but no one bit. Then, Jimmy Johnson and Ronnie Van Zant had a falling out over a misunderstanding. At that point in his life, Van Zant tended to fall out with many. But a year later, they were “discovered” by Al Kooper, who got them signed to MCA. Within a year, they were on their way to becoming major stars.
In the meantime, Neil Young, now ensconced as Rock and Roll Royalty in Southern California, was outraged by some of the footage he saw on the news of civil-rights abuses toward African Americans in the Deep South, and he wrote two landmark songs about it: “Southern Man” and “Alabama.” Both songs have a lot to say about my troubled and beloved home region’s dark side, but Ronnie Van Zant felt there should be an answer song, because he met and befriended a lot of “good people” during his time there. He wrote the lyrics to “Sweet Home Alabama” as a good-natured, loving bull****-call to one of his favorite artists. The idea of the “answer song” was common in the earlier days of rock and roll. The R&B charts had tons of them, and they were also fairly common in the world of country music.
The days of answers songs had already waned by the time Skynyrd recorded theirs. Nonetheless, the airwaves were soon flooded with these lines.
I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.
For the fourth and final verse of “Sweet Home Alabama,” Ronnie Van Zant held out an olive branch to his old mentor, Jimmy Johnson, and the band that he shared with my dad.
In Muscle Shoals, they’ve got the Swampers
They been known to pick a song or two
Lord, they get me off so much
They pick me up when I’m feeling blue, now how ’bout you?
I still have a vivid memory of riding in a 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88 with my grandmother behind the wheel, listening to WQLT FM-107 and hearing that song. It was so exciting to hear my hometown and my dad’s band being called out in a hit song on the radio, even though it had already happened the year before on the Staple Singers’ hit, “I’ll Take You There,” when Mavis called out my dad, “Little David,” during the breakdown.
* * *
Legend has it, one day Neil Young was driving down the L.A. freeway in one of his fine vintage cars. It would have been summer, and I bet the windows were down. He had the radio cranked up when he heard an amazing guitar riff and a Southern voice call out, “Turn it up!”
So Neil did just that.
Neil Young claimed he already was loving the song before he heard his own name called out in the second verse. Then, he loved it even more. He also wrote his own answer song, “Walk On.”
I heard some people been talking me down
Bring up my name and pass it around
I’m sure Ronnie and the boys loved that song. There are iconic photos of Ronnie Van Zant singing at England’s Knebworth Festival in front of nearly 100,000 people, wearing his Neil Young “Tonight’s the Night” T-shirt. Young and Van Zant became friends, and Young was an honorary pallbearer at Van Zant’s funeral.
Such is the duality of The Southern Thing.
